Depth, but on what footing?

How an administration as fixated on loyalty and conformity as this one ever came to produce so unending a series of defectors eager to tell all to anyone who will listen is a topic that probably will keep psycho-historically inclined scholars of the presidency fully employed well into the decade after next. Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, is one of the enterprising journalists who have made the most of this inexplicable confessional impulse.

Suskind has already contributed two important volumes to the large library of books exploring the inner workings of President George W. Bush's secrecy-obsessed White House. In "The Price of Loyalty" he brought to light the administration's pathological intolerance of loyal internal dissent and even ordinary differences of opinion. It was an account that gained authority from the cooperation of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who -- early on -- was purged from the Cabinet for expressions of excessive independence. Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine" delineated the origins and perilous effect of Vice President Dick Cheney's extraordinary influence over the White House's approach to national security and the war on terror. As this reviewer wrote at the time, Suskind's altogether convincing treatment of issues was built on diligently meticulous reporting and clear sourcing of key points.

A reader comes, therefore, to "The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism" with high expectations. One is likely to get up, however, feeling frustrated, confused and in need of further reassurance from the author as to the substance of some of the book's most serious allegations.

Truth to tell, "The Way of the World" is structurally a mess. One suspects that Suskind, mindful that the Bush/Cheney administration is staggering to inglorious conclusion, intended this book to look to the future as well as back to the recent past -- to suggest, in some fashion, a way forward. It's inarguably a worthwhile goal, as well as a canny authorial strategy to lengthen the book's shelf life, if it comes off.

It does not.

You can sense the beginnings of the problem in the faux poetics of the title and in the grandiloquence of the utterly baffling subtitle: Whose truth? Whose hope -- and for what? "Age of Extremism" is a mildly clever gloss on Auden's pointed "The Age of Anxiety," but whose extremism? Is it Bush and Cheney's or Al Qaeda's -- or, perhaps, both?